The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia
Abstract
Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia is one of the most famous of the early works of Clifford Geertz. It principal thesis is that many centuries of intensifying wet-rice cultivation in Indonesia had produced greater social complexity without significant technological or political change, a process Geertz terms "involution".Written for a US-funded project on the local developments and following the modernization theory of Walt Whitman Rostow, Geertz examines in this book the agricultural system in Indonesia and its two dominant forms of agriculture, swidden and sawah. In addition to researching its agricultural systems, the book turns to an examination of their historical development. Of particular note is Geertz's discussion of what he famously describes as the process of "agricultural involution" in Java, where both the external economic demands of the Dutch rulers and the internal pressures due to population growth led to intensification rather than change.
Overview
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
In the citing paper
““Involution” occurs once technology-driven productivity increases are exhausted, such that only net increases in labor or other costly inputs enable increases in production (43).”
From Used planet: a global history (2013) · cites this paper as [43]
In the citing paper
“Agricultural yields within the most densely populated and productive preindustrial land-use systems compared well with modern yields and were sustained in some regions for centuries to millennia, even though they also tended to require extreme inputs of labor and other socially unsustainable hardships (43–45, 92).”
From Used planet: a global history (2013) · cites this paper as [43]
Citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Marx's Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology
Foster, J. B. (1999) · American Journal of Sociology · doi:10.1086/210315 · Cited by 1,495
Patron-Client Politics and Political Change in Southeast Asia
Scott, J. C. (1972) · American Political Science Review · doi:10.2307/1959280 · Cited by 1,251
Xiang, B., & Lindquist, J. A. (2014) · International Migration Review · doi:10.1111/imre.12141 · Cited by 929
Ellis, E. C., Kaplan, J. O., Fuller, D. Q., Vavrus, S., Klein Goldewijk, K., & Verburg, P. H. (2013) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1217241110 · Cited by 812
Metadata
- Authors
- Geertz, C.
- Corresponding author
- Geertz, Clifford
- Venue
- University of California Press eBooks
- Publisher
- University of California Press
- Published
- 1963-12-31
- OpenAlex
- W4246147691
- Cited by
- 1,297
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 69 · 2025: 49 · 2024: 55 · 2023: 32 · 2022: 30 · 2021: 60 · 2020: 34 · 2019: 37 · 2018: 64 · 2017: 29 · 2016: 34 · 2015: 36 · 2014: 31 · 2013: 21 · 2012: 17
- FWCI
- 83.18
- Type
- book
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- University of California Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Development › Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Asian Studies and History
- Social Sciences › Anthropology › Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies
- Keywords
- agricultural involution, Clifford Geertz, wet rice cultivation, swidden agriculture, agricultural intensification, social complexity, modernization theory, Rostow, Dutch colonialism, population growth, ecological change, Java, Indonesia
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
